We have good reason to believe that our data samples are now good
enough to unequivocally allow an unambiguous description of the
clustering of galaxies in the Universe. This description is
entirely consistent with the view of the Universe as a whole that
has emerged from the theoretical and observational research of the
20th. century. There are many details to fill in and there is much
left to understand. The details will come with future observational
projects and the understanding will come with further exploitation
of cross-disciplinary physics. It is the existence of scaling laws
in the galaxy distribution that provides us with a ray of hope that
it is possible to do more than merely models the growth of cosmic
structure: we may be able to understand it.

Arguably the single greatest surprise is how relatively well even
rather simple models appear to reproduce the hard-won data.

Acknowledgments

Bernard Jones and Enn Saar spent several weeks at the Valencia
University Observatory, during which time large portions of this
article were written. They want to thank for its kind hospitality as
well as the facilities provided by the Department of Astronomy and
Astrophysics. We are grateful to S. Paredes for providing us with
some figures. Rien van de Weygaert made extensive comments on the
manuscript for which we are most grateful. The editor, Julian
Krolik, also provided much appreciated guidance. Thanks are due to
all authors, editors and publishers who granted permission to us
to include in this review previously published illustrations,
images and figures. This work has been
supported by Valencia University through a visiting professorship
for Enn Saar, by the Spanish MCyT projects AYA2000-2045 and
AYA2003-08739-C02-01 (including FEDER), by the Generalitat
Valenciana ACyT project CTIDIB/2002/257 and GRUPOS03/170, and by the
Estonian Science Foundation grant 4695.